Where Was I?

You see, this is how it is with me.  You start things and you don't finish them, you've got no stickability, my father was always telling me.  Brief enthusiasms that peter out.  Bored after five minutes.  Incapable of seeing things through.  A character flaw.  And how right he turned out to be.  Not just childish fickleness, but what you might call an accurate description of me.  I don't carry on.  Diaries, correspondences, yoga, gym, friendship, knitting, Latin classes, you name it and I don't carry it on.  And so, a month and a half or thereabouts and no posting.  Can't be bothered. Can't think of anything interesting to say (what on the day the wretched liar Blair finally fucked off?).  Can't bear myself talking about myself all the time, or can bear it but think maybe it's better if I get on with writing about myself and getting paid for  it (see: mercenary, too).  Or just lost interest, don't care, so what, so there.  Likeliest of all, I am infinitely idle.  That last covers about all of it.

I am about to be sixty.  How did I survive so long being me?  It's surprising, really.   And how did my father know  when I was three  what I was going to be like when I was sixty?  At three you're not supposed to have stickability, are you?   Maybe I underestimated him.

Then again, not much happens in my life, and I tend to cancel what does happen, if I possibly can.  I could claim there's just nothing much to write about.  But I've been singularly unsuccessful these last couple of months at activity evasion.  I've been so Stockholm, spent a week in two local schools, written a couple of reviews, got on with the novel to be finished by December and most exhaustingly lolled around in France for a couple of weeks.  And I'm supposed to write a blogs as well?  Eh, Deborah and Val8tine?

Here, for Deborah and Val8tine is my thought for the day:  Where were all the street parties celebrating the Blair departure?  I was in San Francisco the day Richard Nixon resigned and the town went wild.  There was dancing in the streets, painted banners strung across streets, people shook my hand and told me to go home and tell England how proud they were of getting rid of their crook.  And people wonder why the Sixties generation's nostalgic.  Yet I suppose all possibility of a celebration today died of exhaustion during the weeks of endless farewell, to say nothing of all of us biting our knuckles at the thought of Tony Blair the Middle East peace envoy. 

Best, if you can't actually be useful, either to keep busy fiddling with pointless detail or stay asleep.  This is my very latest advice for surviving one's own uselessness in a spectacularly nasty little world.

Comments

[Ronald Kritter]

From 'Tunnel Vision', LRB, 2 August 2007

"I'm not sure whether this passing political analysis means that if Britain had had a privatised healthcare system such as the Americans rejoice in..."

Perhaps because I am from the state of Wisconsin (think: 'cheesehead') and irony is for me partially cloudy -- but 'rejoice in' must have been a phrase made in pure jest.

"If we had access to the private life of God (and there's one who had opportunities and blew it) he'd be the celebridaddy of them all."

This struck me as an astonishing sentence to include within the context of a book review. Is Jesus of Nazareth the one implied? The sentence, if I understood it correctly, mysteriously stands out because of the comparative standing of the other celebrities mentioned.

Ronald Kritter
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

[Lara]

No parties because no hope. People have no hope that there will be change or improvement. There is Brown. Only Brown. Brown is not only an individual, but also sums up this country now: a muddy brown bored mess. That's all people can see. They can't party in mud, even, we're told, at Glastonbury this year. No party. Just muddy hopeless middle-ages.